European drug agency warns of concerning patterns in the consumption of drugs across the bloc, with increasing public health consequences. The situation regarding drugs in Europe is best described with the words "everywhere, everything, everyone", a drug monitoring agency has warned in a flagging the increasing availability of narcotics and increasingly complex commercialisation patterns. The impact of the use of illicit drugs is now seen almost everywhere in society, and “we have never had so many drugs available or produced on the territory of the EU”, Alexis Goosdeel, the director of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) said while presenting the report.
The eport stated that 22 million people used cannabis, 4 million consumed cocaine, and almost 3 million took MDMA in the last year in the EU. The 2024 report showed that 85.4 million people reported having used cannabis at some point in their lives, while in the 2022 report, that number was 78.
6 million. The number of at least one-time users of cocaine jumped from 14.4 million in 2022 to 15.
4 million, and the figure for MDMA — typically called ecstasy — leapt from 10.6 million to 12.3 million.
The drug agency said that almost all comestibles with psychoactive properties have the potential to be used and marketed as drugs, often mislabelled or in compound form. This leads to widespread consumer ignorance about the nature of the drugs consumed, greatly increasing health risks. EMCDDA’.
